I have just installed ubuntu 12.04.1. To be honest I had to run installation several times until it was finished fine. When I finally managed to install it properly, I power on the laptop and the grub shoed up! I selected ubuntu generic. It takes some time to load and when it does I get an error message stating that

error: couldn't read file
Press any key to continue

If I press any button nothing happens. If a leave it there, in a short while there is a black screen loading which gives some weird messages

The thing is that the laptop isn't mine. A friend tried to dual boot ubuntu alongside windows 7 but he didn't succeed. Ubuntu option was in grub, but when you tried to boot it rebooted from the start. So from a Live CD I erased ubuntu, started windows to check if something went wrong, and fortunately everything was OK. Windows started normally!

So I tried to install ubuntu. Before installation was completed the installer crashed! I was afraid that he would lost windows, something that was true...

At that point I tried to install windows but whichever distro(XP, 7{home, proffessional, ultimate},8) I tried it could never reach the end.

So I tried to reinstall ubuntu but I was facing those weird messages. What can I do to move on?

EDIT2: I forgot to mention that my friend gave a punch to his laptop during a game. After that his cooler became to make a weird noise so I checked and it is a bit tortuous but it is working. What I beleive must be wrong is that his HDD makes a weird noise while trying to load ubuntu, which means he might need a new HDD. Could that be true?

1 Answer
1

the ubuntu installation problem could indeed be a partitioning problem which i always solved by prepartinionig my HDD, and it worked then.

if it is your friends laptop, you got to rescue all date. which means you instantly get a extern harddrive and save the complete 'my data' folder, you can do that by booting into a livesystem with a stick, and then just copy everything. if he wants to, save his program folder as well.

then you open gParted (its preinstalled on the live version) and format the whole hard drive like this

30gb for UBUNTU [ext4]

2gb for LINUX-SWAP [swap]

50gb for WINDOWS [ntfs]

* gb for personal DATA [ntfs || ext2]

if he wants to use ubuntu primarily, and windows just occasionally for programs he cant run with wine, i recommend using the ext2 format, and hard mounting the partition as his Home Folder in the ubuntu partition, and installing a ext2 driver on windows (it requires a bit of configuration, but works nice and stable). if he wants to use windows as his primary OS just merge it with the Windows partition.

after that is done, and gparted did not crash because of any HDD errors (which would mean it is broken) install windows first! which is easy, cause it only detects the ntfs partition, and no other, then take the ubuntu stick, and at the beginning of the process, when you're asked how you want to install it (alongside, replace, etc. ) choose 'something else' and define:

30gb UBUNTU as ext4 and / (root || system partition, the system will be installed there)

2gb SWAP as swap (no more needed)

* gb DATA as /home (which is where his complete personal data will be stored, and his complete system + program configuration.)

50gb WINDOWS as windows (it will be mounted under /windows afterwards)

like that, you can always replace your ubuntu partition or delete and all his data will be unaffected, AND you're able to acces to it from both partitions. (setting up ext2 driver is described here FS-Driver

i really hope this helps, if i forgot something, or something did not work write back, me or some1 else is going to help for sure!

Windows installation was completed!!! Now I should install ubuntu...One question though: What I did was 130GB NTFS, 2GB swap and 100GB ext4. You said that I should choose instead of alongside, something else. I think I missed something:I have already a linux swap there;should I repartition the ext4 partition?
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ThanosDec 2 '12 at 12:35

I tried to install ubuntu again twice. The first time the installer crushed again so I tried once more. It took a lot of time to copy files(~1h) and after that it is stuk on "Installing System" for about 1h and the progress bar doesn't seem to be moving. It hasn't loaded yet... What can I do now?
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ThanosDec 2 '12 at 15:20

it does not matter whet ever you repartition it or not, should work either way. you can let it rest for the night, and hope something will move, or klick "show more information" (or something like that) in the bottom right corner, maybe its saying whats wrong, or just asks you a question. :P if its still stuck after one night or so, try hardresetting it, and just boot ubuntu. maybe the core system is already installed, and just needs to update something. if that doesn't work, try redownloading the image (or even 12.10)
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spheniscidaDec 2 '12 at 19:05

I made some checkings using disk utility. The results are on my edited question. It seems that there are ~2000 bad sectors somewhere... What can be done now?
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ThanosDec 3 '12 at 8:58

i'm kinda stuck right now as well, but you can try running fsck -A (which is the tool ubuntu runs during startup sometimes) and see if it spits some errors, and repairs them. if not, maybe his HDD is really broken somewhere and you need to replace it. (and sorry for leaving you stuck for 2 days, but i was kinda stressed with school)
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spheniscidaDec 5 '12 at 21:29